7 Predictions for The Crown Season Three

It's time we finally meet Princess Diana.

Dec 15, 2017

The Crown’s second season was, if possible, even more addictive than the first, and if you’ve already binged the entire thing despite your best intentions to savor every moment of the royal drama, you’re not alone. The good news is that, thanks to history, we already have a pretty good sense of what’s likely to happen in season three, which will probably pick up in the mid-sixties and go through to the mid-seventies.

Season two’s finale ended with the resignation of prime minister Harold Macmillan in October of 1963, although the season jumped back and forth in time and had previously covered later events like the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November of 1963. All of which is to say that creator Peter Morgan has some flexibility when it comes to his timeline–and given the cast change, a significant time jump between seasons two and three feels likely.

Here are seven predictions for what’s to come in season three of The Crown, including Princess Diana, a political revolution, and the one episode that’s guaranteed to be a tearjerker in light of recent events.

You'll see some new faces in the cast next season.

Netflix, Getty

Admittedly, this is not a prediction so much as a solid fact we’ve had confirmed for more than a year, but it’s such a huge deal that it bears repeating. Given the amount of time that The Crown ultimately needs to span, it would take a lot of prosthetics for the same actors to play them for more than two seasons, which is why Olivia Colman will be taking over from Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth when the show returns. Expect more casting information to start rolling in early in 2018, but for now, feel free to spend your Christmas break speculating wildly about who could play the older Philip, Margaret et al.

Camilla Parker Bowles will make her first appearance...

Though Camilla is widely known as Prince Charles’s second wife–and for having an affair with him while he was married to Princess Diana–Charles actually met her long before Diana, in the early 1970s. Producer Susan Mackie has confirmed that Camilla will be introduced in season three, which will follow Charles in his twenties. Though Charles and Camilla's relationship ended in 1973, when she married her first husband Andrew Parker Bowles, it was reportedly rekindled by the 1980s and was ongoing through both of their marriages. In her infamous BBC interview with Martin Bashir in 1995, Diana obliquely referred to Camilla when she said "There were three of us in this marriage."

...And so will the future Princess Diana.

Peter Morgan confirmed last year that Diana Spencer will be introduced “towards the end of season three,” which presumably means that the season will stretch until at least 1977. That was the year a 16-year-old Diana first met Prince Charles, who at the time was dating her older sister Lady Sarah, so this ought to be a delightful mess from the beginning. Charles and Diana were married in 1981, which means their wedding will likely fall early in the fourth season.

Margaret and Tony will have a very public, very acrimonious, very lengthy breakup.

If you were swept up by the vivid, electric chemistry between Vanessa Kirby and Matthew Goode: understandable, but hold your horses. Though Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong Jones remained married for 18 years, the couple drifted apart and went through a very public and elongated breakup before finally divorcing in 1978. There were numerous affairs on both sides and a number of bitter arguments chronicled in the tabloids–so as Kirby told Harper's Bazaar recently, expect "lots of brilliant dysfunctional arguments and plate-smashing."

Britain will elect its first left-wing prime minister in a long time.

Queen Elizabeth II with Prime Minister Harold Wilson in 1969.

Getty Images

The election of Labour leader Harold Wilson in October of 1964 marked a sea change after 13 years of the right-wing conservative party being in power. A slew of liberal laws were passed during Wilson’s tenure–among them the abolition of the death penalty in 1965, and the legalization of abortion and homosexuality in 1967. The Royal family are required to remain politically neutral, but Queen Elizabeth's progressive stance on LGBT rights has long been rumored, so it would be fascinating to see her interact with Wilson and the liberal era he helped usher in.

The horror of Bloody Sunday

It was a massacre so notorious and traumatic in the United Kingdom's history that U2 wrote a song about it. On January 30, 1972, British troops opened fire on a crowd of peaceful civil rights protestors in Northern Ireland, who were marching against a policy of detention without trial. Thirteen civilians were killed, 17 injured, and the incident remained highly controversial for decades to follow. In 2010, following the conclusion of a 12-year inquiry, then-prime minister David Cameron made a formal apology on behalf of the United Kingdom. The Crown has depicted several significant military events to date–most memorably the Suez Crisis early in season two–and given the significance of Bloody Sunday, its omission feels unlikely.

Britain will join the European Union.

So... yes. Britain first joined the European Economic Community on January 1, 1973, along with Ireland and Denmark. Two years later, a referendum was held and 66 percent of the British public voted to stay in the European Community. In light of last year's devastating "Brexit" referendum–in which Brits voted by a narrow margin to leave the European Union, triggering political and economic chaos that remains ongoing eighteen months on–this is likely to be a pretty emotional sequence of events.

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